Weiner: How Penny Marshall’s ‘A League of Their Own’ changed women’s sports
From Natalie Weiner at SB Nation on December 18, 2018:
“There’s no crying in baseball” is the quote, and A League of Their Own is the movie. It comes when Tom Hanks, in the role of usually-inebriated manager Jimmy Dugan, is berating one of the players on his team, the Rockford Peaches, and she starts crying. She starts crying, because all the players were women — just as they actually were in the All-American Girls’ Professional Baseball League.
The ubiquity of the phrase speaks to the 1992 movie’s impact: before the WNBA, before the NWSL, before U.S. women had become nearly unshakable internationally in soccer, basketball, and softball, there was a Hollywood blockbuster film about women playing professional sports that was based on a true story.
Actor and legendary director Penny Marshall rose to fame as Laverne of TV’s Laverne & Shirley. She passed away today at the age of 75. For her fourth feature film, she chose to tell the tale of the then little-known AAGPBL. Despite the fact that even the studios she had contracts with were reluctant to fund the project, she saw spreading the story as imperative.
Read the full article here: https://www.sbnation.com/2018/12/18/18147135/penny-marshall-a-league-of-their-own-impacted-women-in-sports
Originally published: December 20, 2018. Last Updated: December 20, 2018.